I’ve been stuck in bed sick with my own 5-year old twins all week with this terrible flu/plague that’s been going around. After enough rounds of the card game War, enough chapters of Harry Potter, and every Disney DVD ever released, I downloaded a few episodes of The Electric Company to watch with my sons while we all coughed our heads off in unison. I have vivid memories of many of the show’s sketches (remember the silhouetted faces singing “ch…air….chair”? or “It’s the plumber! I’ve come to fix the sink!”)? Sure, I remembered that it was funny. And that it was very cool. But what I didn’t remember was how incredibly educational it was.

As my sons and I watched, I marveled at how Fargo North, Decoder indeed was teaching how to decode sentences using methods I’ve seen so often in our first grade classrooms. Or the series of skits and songs about the silent “e” changing a kit into a kite, The Adventures of Letterman rescuing a man who had been enjoying his tub only to have it turned into a tube, etc. and by dinnertime, my boys were talking about the silent “e,” punctuation and apostrophes. While they are certainly interested in letters and writing, and are showing many signs of pre-literacy, this was downright dramatic. I’d like to go on the record as saying nothing currently on our television airwaves comes anywhere close to the pedagogy, creativity and energy I watched with my sons in these Electric Company episodes. What a brilliant show! The question I’m left with, of course, is how to bring even a tiny kernel of this kind of teaching into my classroom.

But of course, the most fun was seeing Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, Violet the Blueberry from Willie Wonka, Bill Cosby, and hearing the voices of Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel. So for your viewing pleasure, I’ve found a little clip of a young Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader, the grooviest reading cat in town. To quote Easy, throughout my childhood The Electric Company always helped me to see that “Top to bottom, left to right, reading stuff is outtasite!”

http://k12online.wm.edu/GradeOneClassroom.wmv

Doug and Richard are also using classroom documentation to make the process of learning more visible in their classrooms. The ways in which they do this, however, is slightly different in each classroom. Janet posts a daily journal entry to her class website daily. Richard (on the right) posts a month’s worth of daily journals at the end of each month. Doug (on the left) digs into a few individual classroom projects each year, and documents the entire project in great detail. Click below to see an example of Richard’s Monthly Journal and Doug’s recent Earthmover Project:

Richard’s Monthly Journal (.pdf)

Doug Earthmover Project (.pdf)

For Janet, documenting learning in her classroom on a daily basis became an important goal, and she asked for help in getting started. What began as a 1-2 hour process last fall has now been whittled down to a 20 minute/day committment on her part. The steps include taking digital photos, transferring them to her laptop, dragging them into a template she’s created in Keynote, typing up the description and student quotes, saving as a .pdf and uploading the file onto her classroom web page. Here are a few examples:

http://www.mcdsblogs.org/trout

Wow…

But I think one of the biggest points we managed to drive home had to do with how teachers only typically provide parents with a tiny glimpse into their classrooms and the students’ learning process. The rare times parents come to the classroom to see student work it is for the final product — the PowerPoint speech, the Winter Concert, Spring Art Show, Portfolio Day, etc. Rarely are parents exposed to the process of learning, and rarely are students and teachers asked to reflect about what they are learning as they are learning it.

I used an example from my own life as the parent of preschool-aged twins. One of my sons brought home yet another painting from school several weeks ago. When he showed it to me, I thought “that’s nice, honey” and planned to add it to the growing pile of preschool art we already have.

Later in the week, however, the teacher stopped me in the hallway to tell me how excited my son had been about their recent experimentation with color mixing, and upon learning that blue+yellow=green and red+blue=purple, he asked “but how is black made?” The class proceeded to experiment with paints until they came up with black, and his artwork was the end result of the discussion. Suddenly that “nothing” painting became a treasure to me. A glimpse into his development.

A quick note on the back of the painting, a typed caption, or better yet, an audio recording or digital photos and transcription of the class discussion would have allowed parent, teacher and even student to understand the process of learning so much more deeply.